UPCOMING EVENTS

Google today announced that the camera within the Translate app for iOS and Android is now able to translate 13 new languages including Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Thai, and Vietnamese. The update is available starting today and will be rolled out to Translate users worldwide in the coming days, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

The additions of Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, and Punjabi means the camera now knows how to recognize 4 of the top 10 most spoken languages on Earth, according to Babbel.

Also added today was support for camera translations of other languages spoken in south Asia like Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Vietnamese.

Optical character recognition from Google Cloud Vision API was used to train new datasets for the 13 languages, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Translations with the camera in Google Translate do not work offline; however, the Translate app can be granted access to your photos to carry out translations when you re-establish an internet connection.